Love and Consequences isn’t the only memoir just exposed as a fake. Last week Misha Defonseca admitted she made up Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years (Mt. Ivy, 1997). Blake Eskin has a good story about it in Slatewww.slate.com/id/2185493/, which says the book got a blurb from Elie Wiesel. The AP reported that Defonseca said through her lawyers: “This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving.” Defonseca claimed to have been a Jewish child who, aided by wolves, wandered through Europe looking for her deported parents. In fact, her parents were Belgian Catholic resistance fighters killed by the Nazis and she just “felt Jewish.” Eskin rightly argues in Slate that her pain doesn’t justify a book that shows “narcissistic disregard for the suffering of actual Jews.”

(c) 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.

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This would be a great time for the author to use the many worlds quantum mechanics argument that everything that can happen does happen. The wolf thing simply happened in an alternate universe outside our range of vision.

And there are so many of these alternate universes springing up, it’s hard to keep track of them all. Did you see the article in yesterday’s New York Times called “A Family Tree of Literary Fakers”? It went all the way back to Clifford Irving and his bogus autobiography of Howard Hughes.